2013-11-30

Button Labels

On the New UI I use graphical labels for some of the buttons - a magnifying glass for search, a question mark for help, a gear for settings, and a house for "home". Those are all pretty universal iconography for the Web at this point, and there are tooltips for accessibility.

I'm using textual labels for three buttons:

  • Legend - this is pretty unique to this site, and I can't think of a universally understandable icon. I'm pondering whether Legend deserves to be a top level item or should be under "?". I also hide Legend on small screens.
  • Important - this is a "default" search for important worlds.  Again, no universal icon for this concept. I believe this feature will evolve into more of a "browsable, sharable sets of points of interest". Maybe a point-of-interest icon, then?
  • Share - this one is starting to shake out as a standard icon - the three circles in a < formation - but it's not quite universal yet.
Thoughts?

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7 comments:

  1. Joshua Bell11:20 AM

    Maybe a star for what's now "important" ?

    ReplyDelete
  2. 77topaz6:44 PM

    For "share", maybe an amalgamation of the logos of the relevant sites (Twitter, Google+, and Tumblr in this case)? I've seen such graphics used in other locations (but then usually with sharing on Facebook and Twitter).

    ReplyDelete
  3. Joshua Bell9:01 PM

    I went ahead and replaced the "Important" label with a star and I'm liking it better already.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Anonymous9:26 PM

    The link for the sector name, that in the old version went to the printable booklet page, now simply goes back to a duplicate of the current page.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Joshua Bell11:57 PM

    @Anonymous -

    Thanks - I must have pushed only a subset of the files after I tweaked some scripts. Should work now if you reload the page.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Joshua Bell4:42 PM

    ... and now the booket/poster/data links are gone... but that's intentional!

    They've moved up to a (hopefully) more discoverable "Download" button up at the top. If you click on it with nothing "selected" it gives a hint of what's possible.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Consul-At-Arms3:02 PM

    Other than spelling out "Legend" (as you've done), my only suggestion in terms of a symbol would be to use a graphic of a KEY instead.

    In my lengthy experience of maps, civilian and military, "Legend" tends to either be unlabeled as such or marked, unironically, "Legend."

    ReplyDelete